While some of the largest U.S. cable companies are looking primarily to DOCSIS 3.1 to support gigabit broadband deployments, Altice USA has opted instead to deploy fiber-to-the-home, which it says will support speeds up to 10 Gbps.
A five-year Altice FTTH rollout plan announced today and dubbed “Generation GigaSpeed” aims to bring ultra-high speed broadband to a large part of the company’s serving area.
A unit of an international company, Altice USA entered the U.S. cable market a few years ago with its acquisitions of Suddenlink and Cablevision. One of Cablevision’s brands was Optimum, and Altice has used the Optimum brand for cable service in areas acquired from Cablevision.
Altice FTTH Plans
According to today’s announcement, Altice will deploy FTTH throughout all of the company’s Optimum footprint and most of its Suddenlink footprint. The announcement also references “proprietary technologies developed by Altice Labs” but Altice did not immediately reply to an inquiry from Telecompetitor asking for more information about the proprietary technology.
DOCSIS 3.1 is less costly to deploy than FTTH, which likely is what is driving most cablecos to use it for most network upgrades and to reserve FTTH for new builds. And considering that some telcos – notably Verizon – have struggled with finding a business case for FTTH in some metro areas, Altice’s decision may seem surprising.
The company already has deployed FTTH in Europe, however, and has ambitious plans there too. According to today’s announcement, the company plans to make FTTH available to 27.3 million homes in France and Portugal by 2022.
